The Education Center of IBR is dedicated to promoting research and practice pertaining to the applications of behavior-analytic methods and procedures to support life-long learning at the level of the individual student. In particular, EC's interests and initiatives include identifying and validating achievement oriented instructional tactics to insure that all learners across the life span, whether in formal classroom setttings or elsewhere, wiil have access to conditions that enable the individual learner to reach a designated level of competency in the knowledge or skill domain under consideration.

To influence policy aimed to improve the effectiveness of public education, a rational pedagogy is advocated that acknowledges the fact that students come to a classroom or other setting with different histories and different levels of prepardness to learn something new. Rather than focusing on instruction aimed to improve average performance within groups of students during arbitrarily constrained time periods, instructional tactics are recommended to meet the level of the individual learner.

The range of advocacy initiatives will include not only the development and implementation of effective evidenced-based instructional tactics, but it will also involve organizational change initiatives to encourage greater flexibility in the temporal boundaries that now prevent many students from having the opportunity to repeat the conditions of learning until a criterion of mastery has been reached. Adequate resources must be made available to our educational system, and a reorientation regarding the sources of individual differences in student achievement is indicated. This will require wide-spread acceptance that a student's unique history largely determines current performance in contrast to the influence of such unobservables as intelligence and motivation.

An optimal teaching strategy in the 21st century should be one that respects the right of each and every student to have the opportunity to achieve mastery, where opportunity is taken to mean unlimited exposure to the proper conditions of learning until an achievement outcome has been attained. It is the objective of IBR's Education Center to advocate such a strategy within the context of a behavior-analytic foundation that addresses the needs of the individual learner.